Here’s a commercial for 7UP that ran for two months before it was taken off the air. A charming young black salesman opens with: “They say if you’re gonna sell something, get yourself a captive audience.” Cut to prison bars and slamming cell doors. He walks along the cellblock handing out cans through the bars and then drops one. Mugs to the camera: “Ooo, I’m not picking that up.” Then with a grizzled biker-type cellmate: “When you bring the 7UP, everyone is your friend.” Cellmate turns meaningly toward him: “That’s enough being friends.” Cell door closes and cameras begin to pull back: “Hey, where are you goin’?”

Read more by Christopher Hitchens. Photograph by Christian Witkin.

The target “demographic” for this ad is members of the 12-to-24 age group, who are therefore assumed to “get” the joke about rape as a constant and reliable feature of American prison life. (Take the catchy slogan “Make 7UP Yours” and remove the first word and there might be a real thigh-slapper in there somewhere.) Late-night comedians make frequent use of “Don’t drop the soap” jokes, and I have seen a bail-bond advertisement built entirely around a sequence of a nerdy young guy being propelled into a prison shower room.

It might not take a visitor from another planet, or even another country, to detect something warped in a culture that not only takes rape for granted but expects its children to find it amusing. Here is a case history or two where in order to see the funny side you would really have had to be there:

“X claimed me as his property and I didn’t dispute it. I became obedient, telling myself at least I was surviving.… He publicly humiliated and degraded me, making sure all the inmates and gaurds [sic] knew that I was a queen and his property. Within a week he was pimping me out to other inmates at $3.00 a man. This state of existence continued for two months until he sold me for $25.00 to another black male who purchased me to be his wife.”

This is one of the more printable first-hand accounts from the “Slavery” section of a Human Rights Watch report entitled “No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons.” And, as a description of the state of affairs in many jails, the term “slavery” is no exaggeration. An inmate who has been “turned out,” as the saying goes, may become the wholly owned subsidiary of an individual, or even a gang. Not only is he a slave in the appalling sexual sense of that term, but he is compelled to turn over all his property, any gifts or money from “outside,” and then be rented or hired out for tasks that might be described as demeaning: from cleaning toilet bowls to doing laundry before being subjected to recreational beating or coercive intercourse.

This re-emergence of the plantation culture in publicly funded American institutions does have a relationship to our racist past, as well as to our racist present. An unprotected person of any age or sex or ethnicity can become a victim, but there are clearly some violent black offenders who derive an additional thrill from imposing the master-slave relationship on a white boy. And this form of “payback” is precisely, if paradoxically, what the white supremacists encourage. Take the case of John William King, a young white burglar, slight of stature, who was shoved into a Texas penitentiary a few years ago.

By all accounts, the “white power” gang leadership in the place urged the warders to put King in the “black” part of the system. Since he weighed no more than 140 pounds, King soon found himself being savagely sodomized by packs of black prisoners. He was thus forced to appeal to the white racists for protection, which was their recruitment plan in the first place. Upon release, a somewhat morose and twisted (and indoctrinated) King teamed up with two other characters and fastened the late Mr. James Byrd to the back of a pickup truck before dragging him to death.

The Texas prison system is said to be the worst in this respect, and grimly goes on churning out victimized psychopaths bent on sharing their concerns with the rest of us—but this is not just a southern phenomenon. The man whose story I quoted above was in Michigan. And it was a spokesman for the Massachusetts Department of Correction, Anthony Carnevale, who when questioned about rape in the system replied, “Well, that’s prison … I don’t know what to tell you.”

The widespread view of prison rape—what one might call the “Shit happens” view—is wrong in several respects. First, it suggests that an occasional bit of unpleasantness in the showers is unavoidable. Second, it implies that those to whom the shit happens are either getting their just deserts or indulging their own desires. Third, it concedes that the authorities themselves are well aware of what goes on.

The last of these points is in a way the most shocking one. The guards can’t be everywhere at once, let’s agree, but there is no possible way for them to be unaware of the actual traffic in flesh that goes on. And the evidence is that this knowledge amounts to collusion. Rape establishes a hierarchy in jail, and some lazy elements among the warders and wardens find that this hierarchy makes their job of control an easier one.

Bad enough as that is, it works against the impression that people are getting what they deserve. The gangs are run by the most violent and antisocial elements, while the victims are overwhelmingly nonviolent and are often in prison for offenses that hardly merit jail time at all. Much attention was briefly generated by the suicide of a young man named Rodney Hulin, who was given an astonishing eight years behind bars for his first offense, the prank/crime of setting fire to a Dumpster. He was 16 and weighed about 125 pounds when he went in, and he was ready to kill himself by the time he was 17. A later inquiry uncovered written appeals from him, to the authorities, to be placed in protective custody. Though doctors had found tears in his rectum, these appeals had been ignored. When his mother appealed for help, according to her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the warden told her that Rodney needed to grow up. “This happens every day,” he said, “learn to deal with it. It’s no big deal.”

Rape, if committed on the outside against anyone of any age or gender, is an extremely serious crime. Crime does not lose its criminal character by being transferred to the prison system: a murder or a stabbing in jail is treated as a murder or a stabbing. It is not the job of the forces of law and order to ignore crime, let alone to collaborate with it. And this collaboration, which may well extend to actual payoffs between gangs and guards, has a coarsening and corrupting effect beyond itself. Only when it was much, much too late did we begin to ask, about Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, “How long has this been going on? How many people are involved? How far up does it go?” Two of those accused, it now turns out, had been well known as sadists and bullies when they worked in American jails. How surprising is that, when the system itself operates on the principle of using the worst prisoners to discipline and control the most unoffending ones?

None of this is happening, as Abu Ghraib also makes plain, in a universe detached from our own. The State Department delayed release of a report on U.S. efforts to promote human rights and democracy in other countries out of sheer embarrassment at events in Iraq. If that condemnation and shame aren’t bad enough, consider what the scale of a report on American prisons might involve. “One out of every 140 Americans is now in prison,” says Lara Stemple, the brilliant former director of Stop Prisoner Rape, a national human rights group based in Los Angeles. “This is now the highest proportion per capita of any country in the world. New laws on mandatory sentencing have pushed the numbers up and led to overcrowding and the incarceration of many nonviolent offenders. The Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 has made it harder for inmates to sue. And one out of every 10 male prisoners has been raped.”

Stemple, now a human rights professor at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, goes on to tell me, very coolly but decidedly, this is a disaster for the rest of society not just because it makes hardened criminals out of previously moderate ones, and not just because it intensifies racism and segregation, but because it’s an almost perfect way of spreading the AIDS virus. “If you were looking for a good definition of unsafe sex,” she says, “forcible unprotected anal penetration would probably be it.” We don’t have good figures on the transmission of the disease, but that’s because it’s hard to get any answers at all from a system where sexually inflicted injuries are often found only at autopsy.

You might describe Lara Stemple as a feminist lawyer or as an attorney with a strong commitment to “women’s issues,” and based on her track record you would be right. But she thinks that it’s now possible that the number of male rape victims in America rivals the number of female victims. (The Department of Justice reported that more than 66,000 women were raped in 2003.) She also argues very well against the false idea that this is “gay rape.” “There are obviously gay men in the prison system. But the hierarchy of rape has ‘straight’ men at the top and the bottom. The rapist will preserve his heterosexual ‘identity’ as the boss, while it’s the victim who is ‘feminized’ and called ‘pussy’ or ‘bitch’ or ‘queen.’” A single very poignant example from the Human Rights Watch report helps bear her out and show that very familiar and traditional modes of domination are being reinforced here. “Of course rape is a crime of hatred,” says one much put-upon inmate. “I’m ugly as a mud fence; why would [he] want to have sex with me?”

But please do not believe for a moment that women, once incarcerated in the United States, are safe from rape, either. Some women have sarcastically said that if jailed at least they’d be free from violent husbands or drive-by shooters. But you couldn’t prove this by one of Lara Stemple’s lurid examples: the fate of the 24-year-old Jackie Noyes at Taycheedah “Correctional Institution.” Some circumstantial evidence is very powerful, as Henry David Thoreau said about finding a trout in your milk. If a female prisoner becomes pregnant, therefore, you can be reasonably certain that something is, or has been, going on. Swift action was taken in this case: when the mentally disturbed Ms. Noyes was impregnated by an officer of the jail, she was sentenced to nearly a year in solitary confinement. And the guard was let go. This was in liberal Wisconsin, a state that at the time had no law banning sexual relations between inmates and guards. Leafing through some of the similar reports makes one want to be part of another species: eager guards show up with cosmetics, money, food, and even promises of a visit from the children, in return for a few appalling moments with the cell door closed. Just to keep it to the Midwest, Cindy and David Struckman-Johnson of the University of South Dakota have published unrefuted research about a prison where one in four women has been sexually abused. You may have been nauseated by pictures of women soldiers humiliating Iraqi males in Abu Ghraib, but there are jails in this country where male officers are not prevented from supervising female inmates, in the showers and in the lavatories, and making whatever comments or gestures they feel like making. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen in comparable countries, where there are conjugal visits, inspections, and openness to drop-bys from human-rights organizations.

One way to think about rape, as an act of cruelty and violence rather than as a degraded version of sex, is to picture it (actually you can’t picture it: let’s just say imagine it) as happening to someone other than yourself. A pack of taunting louts holds someone down, kicks this person around for a bit, violates every part of the victim’s privacy in turn and by turns, and then defecates on the person afterward. You would prefer this to happen (a) to your wife, (b) to your husband, (c) to your daughter, (d) to your son, or (e) with your tax dollars. Cross out, with emphasis, any that do not apply.

This isn’t a losing struggle all the time. Some prisons are adopting the panopticon, where all cells are built with transparent material and are arranged around a central tower where everything can be seen at all times. This “direct supervision” policy is now in use in the San Francisco area, where it began to be implemented after the rape of a young man named Billy Besk. Even in Texas, at the Carol S. Vance unit in Sugarland, it has been discovered that inmates behave better, and have a chance of minimal rehabilitation, once they feel reasonably safe. They are in prison, after all, as punishment, not for punishment—and certainly not to become crime victims. Congress made progress with the Prison Rape Reduction Act of 2002, sponsored by Senators Ted Kennedy and Jeff Sessions and Congressmen Frank Wolf and Bobby Scott, which attempts to hold states accountable if they fail to comply with clear standards about reporting and combating the practice. But the awful thing is that it is a practice.